Madumo, a Man Bewitched

By Adam Ashforth

No one answered when I tapped at the back door of Madumo's home on Mphahlele Street a few days after my return to Soweto, so I pushed the buckling red door in a screeching grind of metal over concrete and entered calling, "Hallo?"

So begins this true story of witchcraft and friendship set against the turbulent backdrop of contemporary Soweto. Adam Ashforth, an Australian who has spent many years in the black township, finds his longtime friend Madumo in dire circumstances: his family has accused him of using witchcraft to kill his mother and has thrown him out on the street. Convinced that his life is cursed, Madumo seeks help among Soweto's bewildering array of healers and prophets. An inyanga, or traditional healer, confirms that he has indeed been bewitched. With Ashforth by his side, skeptical yet supportive, Madumo embarks upon a physically grueling treatment regimen that he follows religiously-almost to the point of death-despite his suspicion that it may be better to "Westernize my mind and not think about witchcraft."

Ashforth's beautifully written, at times poignant account of Madumo's struggle shows that the problem of witchcraft is not simply superstition, but a complex response to spiritual insecurity in a troubling time of political and economic upheaval. Post-apartheid Soweto, he discovers, is suffering from a deluge of witchcraft. Through Madumo's story, Ashforth opens up a world that few have seen, a deeply unsettling place where the question "Do you believe in witchcraft?" is not a simple one at all. The insights that emerge as Ashforth accompanies his friend on an odyssey through Soweto's supernatural perils have profound implications even for those of us who live in worlds without witches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226774527

Book preview

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1

WHERE'S MADUMO?

No one answered when I tapped at the back door of Madumo’s home on Mphahlele Street a few days after my return to Soweto, so I pushed the buckling red door in a screeching grind of metal over concrete and entered calling, Hallo? From behind the bedroom door to the left of the kitchen Madumo’s sister, Ouma, peered out, her head wrapped in a faded blue towel. She greeted me and gestured towards the sitting room before returning to her bath.

I perched myself on the edge of the large overstuffed cranberry-colored velvet sofa, still sheathed in its clear plastic cover, and waited. The old four-room matchbox house, an icon of oppression in apartheid-era Soweto, had been recently extended by pushing out the front wall and installing floor-to-ceiling windows in place of the old metal-framed glass panels. In each of the two windows, large framed photographs of the Bishops Lekganyane, the founder of the Zion Christian Church and his son and successor, faced out to the front yard, greeting anyone who ventured past the heavy steel gate with a sign of the power and piety protecting the house. A new display cabinet, pale pink and glossy, was stocked to overflowing with bottles of generic spirits and ersatz liqueurs rarely tasted in these beer-drinking parts. A family of china cats were nestled amongst the liquor. On the kitchen table, splaying perilously on the yellow plastic surface, a dozen or so bottles of Carling Black Label beer were racked in a rickety wooden wine stand. Why so much liquor in a house of Zionists, I wondered as I sank back into the crackling plastic, since Zionists are pledged to abstain?

When I last visited this house, two years ago, the place was submerged in a sea of hand-crocheted lace doilies. Hundreds of them in all sizes and patterns covered every available surface. In the corner, freshly laundered doilies had been stacked in a neatly tapering tower nearly two feet high. The mother of this house was a great one for doilies. I used to feel self-conscious about walking over them in my heavy boots until Madumo told me not to worry: There’s nowhere to walk without walking on them, he said, so walk. In the kitchen doilies covered the coal stove, the electric hotplate, the table, and every inch of cutting space: You can’t fry an egg without folding fifty doilies first, Madumo used to complain. His mother had been crocheting them for years. She was not a well woman—sugar diabetes, plus high blood, and nerves—or so I was told at the time. Piling up her doilies day by day, she awaited her husband’s return. The father of her family never did return, though the pile of doilies grew and grew.

Where’s Madumo? I asked when his sister finally emerged from her room carrying a blue plastic basin full of sudsy water to the drain outside.

He’s no more staying here, Ouma replied, glancing down across the delicate balance of her basin to where I floated on the sofa. Her manner was arch and offhand, habitually disdainful in the manner of a woman who knows she’s considered proud but is confirmed in her belief, as she takes an afternoon bath, that she has much to feel proud about.

I heard you chased him away, I said.

"No, we didn’t chase him. He just left after our mother passed away. He was doing funny things. Too much . . ."

I followed her out to the tap in the backyard, where she proceeded to tell me a convoluted tale of Madumo’s misdeeds. I couldn’t follow all the details. She spoke as if recalling a malicious private pleasure. It seemed my friend had borrowed money from a relative to buy counterfeit banknotes and then failed to repay the debt. Six thousand rands, she said. Imagine! When I asked her to explain she merely snorted: You must ask him yourself when you see him.

Where’s he staying? I asked. The tap gushed as she wiped the basin with her washcloth.

Who knows? she replied, shaking the basin free of water in an arc of rapid-fire drops to the hard red clay, as if to indicate that the interview was over. He’s no more coming this side.

Well, if you see him, tell him I’m looking for him.

Okay, she replied, though I could see she wasn’t hoping to see him soon.

I could easily have found Madumo myself. Mpho, our mutual friend, had told me where his room was—somewhere on the first street this side of Vusi’s shebeen in Mapetla East. He’d also told me he wouldn’t help me find our old friend. The man has changed, Mpho had said when I asked after an absent Madumo upon my arrival. He’s no more like he used to be. Friends were crowding that day into the house in Lekoka Street where I always stayed, to welcome me back to Soweto. Neighbors stopped in to enjoy the beer; the kitchen was bustling with women; the street and the yard were an uproar of children . . . but there was no sign of Madumo. Where’s Madumo? I had asked, only to receive a collective shrug. Mpho tried to tell me not to expect him. I pressed for reasons. He’s changed, he said again, outlining the details of a long, complicated squabble that sounded to me like something I should rise above, and I very much doubt that he’s been going to school. No, my man, I very much doubt it. I heard he’s selling drugs and fakes. Mpho would say no more.

I knew the street where Madumo was said to be staying, and it would not have been difficult to walk over and ask around until I found his room. No doubt I would have met people along the way surprised to find a lone white man on foot asking after a local guy in Deep Soweto. But although I’d been away I was still well known in Mapetla, so before long someone would have been sure to recognize me and help me locate my friend. At least it wouldn’t have been too difficult in the daylight hours; I wouldn’t risk being out on those streets alone after dark. Yes, I could have found Madumo easily enough. But I couldn’t be bothered. For like everyone else I encountered as I asked after Madumo, I was angry with him too. I resented the fact that he hadn’t come to greet me on my arrival, especially as I’d sent him the money for his school fees some months before and never received any thanks in reply. Still, I wanted to see him again—if only to hear his story and vent my spleen.

We have long been like brothers, Madumo and me. In the face of danger and death, which is never far away for young men in Soweto, there is no question that we stand together. But like many brothers, our connection is rarely untroubled. When I am away from Soweto, Madumo seems always to be with me. Fond, loving memories I carry—to be sure—but memories of Madumo are often a troubling presence in my life, like a broken bone of years ago or an old scar that can be worn as a trophy until the weather changes and an unsettled night brings on the ache anew. Whenever word of Madumo reaches me in New York, and it inevitably arrives secondhand as he doesn’t have a phone and rarely writes unless desperate for money, it always carries news of catastrophe: he’s been stabbed and robbed, or beaten, or chased away from home. I have worried about him for years, of course. But thoughts of Madumo regularly rouse something else in me, something far less satisfying than plain, unvarnished feelings of friendship and concern. I wouldn’t say my feelings at such times are guilt, exactly, although I sometimes still feel guilty wondering if I couldn’t do more for him. Nor could I call it exasperation, though such a feeling is a frequent presence when Madumo himself is around. It’s rather that I find myself keeping these other feelings at bay by exploiting a certain distance or detachment in myself, a certain reserve. And for that, after all we’ve been through together, I can’t help but feel guilty. It’s not a simple story to tell.

I first met Madumo on June 16, 1990, the anniversary of the famous 1976 Soweto Revolt. Madumo, along with Mpho, was a former schoolmate of a friend of mine in the United States named Marks, whom I had met when he was a student in northern Minnesota—a solitary black South African in a land of snow and Scandinavians—and I was a visiting Australian teaching at the local university. When Marks heard I would be traveling to South Africa on a research trip to study the transition to democracy, he deputed his friends at home to show me Soweto and asked his mother to arrange a place for me to stay. She contacted the Mfetes, who were happy to host a visitor from overseas at their house in Lekoka Street, to show him life under apartheid, although they were unsure of the reception a white man would receive in the black township. They prepared for the worst. I was only intending to stay overnight before returning to the university in the white suburbs to continue with my research, but I hadn’t reckoned on the warmth of the welcome I would find, nor the power of this place to pull me ever more firmly into its orbit. Soweto opened for me as a world quite different from anything I had ever read about in books, yet it seemed strangely familiar as well. It took many years for me to learn how to live there, and though I now know how to do that well enough, Soweto always finds ways to confound me.

Madumo was twenty-five when we first met; Mpho, twenty-one; I, thirty-one. Where Mpho offers a clear, open face to the world and a trusting look that inspires trust in return, Madumo’s brow seems perpetually furrowed or teetering on the edge of a frown, as if grappling with a problem he can’t yet identify, something that might be deep inside him or way off in the distance. His is a restless intelligence, and he has a philosopher’s cast of mind: blessed with the ability to doubt and cursed with the capacity to question. Strangers routinely misread his contemplation or his mischievous provocative questions for hostility and respond in kind. He is often mistaken for a thug, though he doesn’t sport the scars of a seasoned criminal. Like most young men in Soweto, he has tried his hand at crime, but found he lacks the taste for cruelty requisite for success. In fact he is the gentlest of souls. Madumo always seems to inspire distrust. Once, at the airport, when I left him to mind my cases for a moment, a kindly lady intervened and warned me not to trust him. She was white, as it happened, but she could just as easily have been a Sowetan. Madumo often seems to have that effect on people. Mostly it amuses him. At times, however, perplexed and depressed, he wonders why he is so marked. Mpho never has such troubles. He is always well-liked.

The day I arrived in Soweto was the first anniversary of the ’76 Revolt to be celebrated in what used to be called the new South Africa, the first to be addressed by leaders of the newly legalized African National Congress, who were fresh from exile and prison. Mpho met me in Johannesburg, and we traveled by minibus taxi back to the township, to the rally at Jabulani Amphitheater. From every corner of Soweto the comrades came bedecked in the green, gold, and black colors of the liberation movements, marching through the dusty streets to Jabulani with their banners and flags, toyi-toyi-ing in their martial high-stepping dance and singing their slogans of struggle. Siyaya ePitoli, they sang. We are going to Pretoria! "Shay a ’maBulu," they chanted. Hit the Boers! Kill the Boers! Kill the farmers! Everyone was a Comrade, and we saluted each other with clenched fists—Com! From the streets of Soweto it seemed as if the Young Lions had roared and the regime of the Boers was at bay. Freedom seemed close at hand.

Jabulani Amphitheater was crammed to overflowing that day with legions of exuberant youths. Revered elders of the ANC and assorted emissaries from around the world addressed the crowd and the cameras, celebrating the Youth of Soweto and their Struggle while imploring them to be disciplined and patient with the talks about talks. When the bands began to play at the end of the day, the dignitaries and journalists departed, leaving fifty thousand Sowetans singing the songs of freedom as if with one voice. As darkness settled onto the coal-fire orange of a Soweto winter’s sunset, I joined the serpentine threads of young Sowetans weaving through the pathways in the long dry grass. My new friends, along with a detachment of their comrades, escorted me to Mapetla and into another world. I could never have dreamt, as we went out on the town in Soweto that night, that in the years to come this place would seem like home and the people I was with would become like family. Nor could I have foretold that in becoming part of their world mine would be changed forever.

To say I was a center of attention in those days when I first encountered Soweto would be an understatement, and to claim it didn’t turn my head would be a lie. Here I was in a place that was at the center of one of the great moments in twentieth-century world history—the last chapter in the history of white domination in Africa, a final closing of the book on five hundred years of European colonialism—and I was being welcomed as a white man into a place made for Blacks under the auspices of white racism. Until recently it had been illegal for a white person to stay overnight in a black township. Even to visit during the day required a permit. The only white faces usually encountered in Soweto, apart from one or two in clerical garb, belonged to policemen or government officials and were hated. Yet all I had to do was be there as a friend—and the fact that I was there was taken by most to mean that I must be a friend—in order to be celebrated as a symbol of the new South Africa. I was feted as a sign that black and white could in fact live together, an implicit rebuke to the segregationists who had ruled this place for so long. Of course I felt like a fraud.

In all that clamor over the novelty of a white man living in Soweto, it took time to discover who my true friends were. It took time to learn how to live in a place where the risk of violent death is so great and the chances of securing justice through recourse to public authorities are so slim; where the struggle for the basic necessities of life is so hard. It took time, too, to learn that the essence of friendship in such a place is premised not just upon emotional or intellectual affinity but upon the unquestioned willingness to face death for one another and to share willingly whatever bounty good fortune might dispense. Over time Madumo and I, along with Mpho and Thabo, the eldest son of the family with whom I stayed, became like brothers. We faced the risk of death together and survived. We helped each other in whatever ways we could without question. And when we quarreled, we reconciled and made peace because we were brothers.

In the years following 1990, as South Africa stumbled towards democracy, Soweto like other places was torn apart by war between ANC supporters and members of the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party. Residents suffered mysterious terrorist attacks on their homes and in trains. Beloved leaders were killed. It seemed as if secret forces within the government were mounting a concerted conspiracy to thwart the political birthright of the people. With freedom at last so close to hand, the pace of constitutional negotiations seemed glacial. When the ANC took its place in the limelight, first as a partner in negotiations in 1990 and finally, after 1994, as the government, the sense of a historic moment having arrived was palpable. But the flurry of hopeful expectations in Soweto gradually dissipated into an abiding sense of disappointment as the leaders reaped the reward of the struggle while times got tougher for those who had risked their lives and sacrificed their schooling for freedom.

With the ending of apartheid, profound transformations in everyday life in Soweto began. The greater opportunities afforded to Africans in government and business exacerbated rapidly growing inequalities within black populations, which in previous generations had been compelled to live in conditions of relative socio-economic parity. At the same time, the community solidarity fashioned through political opposition to an oppressive regime fragmented into a frenzy of individualistic consumerism. Opportunities greatly expanded for the new black elite and the swelling middle classes, accelerating a trend that had been underway for more than a decade, but the benefits expected from democracy failed to materialize for the majority of the population. Jobs were few; wages were low. The value of the rand fell, resulting in a steep rise in the price of the imported consumer goods that are so essential to marking status. The young men who had been feted as the Young Lions of the Struggle were now left to loiter on street corners. They soon found other avenues for expressing themselves and securing the means of status; crime and violence remained rampant.

Despite the dawning of democracy, then, people were still suffering. Yet the task of interpreting the meaning of misfortune was becoming more complex. Hithertofore, the misfortunes of individuals and families in a place like Soweto could be reckoned not only by reference to particular causes but also to a general name hanging over the suffering of all black people—Apartheid. Now, with apartheid gone, the sorrows of an unfair fate could only be measured, case by case, against the conspicuous progress and good fortune of particular relatives, colleagues, and neighbors, not to mention the ubiquitous images in the media of black people who had made it, and advertisements tailored to their desires. Such post-apartheid developments fed undercurrents of jealousy and envy—a dangerous development in a place such as Soweto, where physical and spiritual security is so precarious. There, jealousy is widely considered to be the primary motivation not only of physical violence, but also of witchcraft, and witchcraft, loosely understood as the capacity to cause harm or accumulate wealth by illegitimate occult means, permeates every aspect of everyday life.

Through good fortune with research grants and leave from my teaching job, I was able to stay in Soweto for most of the time until the first democratic elections of 1994. After that I had to return to work in New York and have only been able to return to Soweto for three months each northern summer. As the years passed, the bonds of fraternity that once bound us so close—Mpho, Madumo, Thabo, and me—became fractured and strained.

Such was the situation, then, when I returned to Soweto and failed to find Madumo. A week passed after my visit to Madumo’s home, then another, with no sign of my erstwhile friend. I was still nursing my resentment at his neglect when Thabo organized a car, a Mazda of the variety known in these parts as iDombolo—the dumpling—after its resemblance to a local dish, a football-sized dough ball steamed in a plastic bag in a pot on the stove top. Thabo and I bought the car from a couple of young Indian guys in a town to the west of Soweto. They told us it was their father’s, but the documents referred to a man with a Tswana name living in a hospital in North-West Province. It didn’t cost us much and was guaranteed by virtue of its age not to attract hijackers. Plus, as a car favored by maGents, the typical Soweto guys (at least, those who can’t afford BMWs), it would signify a degree of belonging that my white skin would normally belie. The Indians must have had good contacts in the traffic department because all the papers were in order.

We were mobile and it was Saturday night.

Should we check Madumo? Thabo asked as we drove through Mapetla.

Why not? replied Mpho.

Though angry with Madumo, Mpho was nostalgic for the nights when we four roamed together through Soweto, drinking and dancing and playing cat-and-mouse with the police. It wouldn’t be the same going out on a Saturday night without Madumo, aka Madube, aka Madume, aka Mad-Dumo, or just the plain old Madman. We call him the Madman because his eccentricities and enthusiasms many times had brought us close to disaster. Most people don’t appreciate Madumo’s irreverence and taste for irony—like the time when he decided to reinterpret the New Testament in a loud voice in a crowded shebeen in this deeply religious place to prove that Jesus was a criminal who was justly punished for, amongst other lesser crimes, counterfeiting wine out of water.

We pulled into Rakuba Street. Dusk had not long settled over the rows of matchbox houses, and mothers were still at their gates calling children from their dusty play. Music was blaring from the stereo of a car parked near another under which a mechanic was working while his friends loitered nearby, drinking beer. Madumo was strolling down the street towards us, his shoulders hunched against the winter chill as it cut through his tattered blue Giants shirt. Thabo drove at him as if to run him down. The car skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust.

Madumo stopped, peered into the car, opened the door, and climbed in. Howzit gents? he said. That was all: Howzit gents?

So-Where-To? asked Thabo.

Soweto! echoed Mpho, clapping his hands onto the back of Thabo’s seat, and for another Saturday night it was almost like the old days.

But it wasn’t the old days. Soweto had changed; we had changed. The old townships of Apartheid were no longer blazing with protest and promise. We were no longer youths without cares. My friends were all fathers now. Thabo had a permanent job and was facing the prospect of a wedding. Mpho had almost completed his law degree and was about to start work. I was a junior professor facing down the tenure clock in New York. And Madumo had been accused of using witchcraft to murder his mother.

I’ve been having troubles, said Madumo when we finally found a space to sit in a corner of Philly’s crowded shebeen. "Troubles I tell you, too many troubles. Too many